The success of many organizations today hinges on customer care. High quality in customer care produces customer loyalty and repeat business. With much of the telephonic customer service industry moving to overseas locations, insuring quality in customer service for call center operations is becoming of paramount importance.
A myriad of factors impacts the quality of an organization's customer care: knowledge of the organization's and customers' products, telephone etiquette and communication skills, routing calls to the proper product specialists, workload distribution amongst representatives, adequate training of representatives, etc. Each factor is addressed by different products that seek to increase the level of service with respect to that factor. For example, software products exist that permit a customer service manager to randomly sample the calls of his call center agents and to review those calls for call quality.
Implementation of the support tools is often difficult and counter-productive. Off-the-shelf tools are preferred by companies because they reduce the ramp-up time needed to grow the customer service departments in order to meet the increased demands. However, often this technology must be supplemented with home-grown in-house tools and proprietary data. Furthermore, the knowledge management tools that both track data within the systems and support training on those systems must be integrated and operate together with the other tools.
When a tool, or component of a tool, must be replaced, the upgrade path is often arduous because of the complex interconnectivity between the different components of the system. Therefore, systems and methods that support efficient upgrade and management of the tools used in a call center environment are desirable and needed in order to increase efficiency, productivity and quality of service provided by that call center operations.